Reach for a different model

Our society is shifting, and patterns are evolving. There are behaviors and actions gaining steam on multiple fronts, and what the future looks like will ultimately be decided by lots of individuals either caving, or holding the line, or deciding that there's another option.

This social fractal is not my normal reference-heavy fractal. Please feel free to supplement with other social fractals, and reach for Wired, Handbasket, Contrarian, Blood in the Machine, Carole Cadwalladr to start getting a bead on our shifting present.

• Will people be frightened into submission on the worry of an immediate pressure/antagonism/violence?
• Will so many wake up that each of us deciding that enough is enough will be like a dam breaking?
• Will we decide on a reset to something near to the status quo of the last few decades, with just a few egregious hands tied?
• Will we decide to dig deep, find courage, have imagination, trust each other, and define something new?

Current state

What we need to understand is that the society being outlined – in Project 2025, by HR1 and administration changes, in the cultures that they are promoting, in the fundamental designs of the systems (especially AI) they are turning to – is that of a population intended to hold up a decider. Or leader, or king; but I'm going with decider here because I want people to think about what's being decided, not all the extra context other words bring with them.

We are intended to be faceless, expendable, replaceable, swappable. There will always be examples held up to instill fear and impress upon us the value of complying in advance, just as they've started in earnest with immigrant roundups and concentration camps, and the retribution politics behind many government firings. As more people stick to the rules, the goalposts will move until the offense could be as simple as a lack of deference in a moment of distraction. They are, ultimately, abusers looking to control not only interpersonal relationships, houses of worship, and business hierarchies. They intend control of government, so their subjects have no non-violent recourse.

Think of it like the Church of Scientology, with all the behavioral pressures and acceptance of shame and punishment for nigh-arbitrary offenses (Leah Remini and Michael Rinder have a significant corpus of documentaries around this). But now with the force and will of government behind it, no 'higher' authority to turn to.

What the deciders are focused on is their sense that there are too many people who think for themselves. The idea of independence without others to prop them up and ease their way through the world is deeply dissonant.

The easy pathway to consolidate their decider role is cultural constructs – gender roles, slavery, education as privilege, clear signals of in-group status, and all wrapped up with a pretty bow of just being the way it is and intracultural balancing mechanisms. Where that fails, they'll turn to psychological and physical abuse, all made valid through laws that were written and passed by only a few.

They can only see two ways: decider, or subject.

They cannot see a world where individuals and the group can thrive, because in their construct individuals can't thrive without subsuming a group of others. They will look around the natural world and see examples of what they believe is a reflection of their preferred state. They hold up the examples and try to convince us it's this is our nature – and often on deeply mistaken interpretations. They prefer big, scary animals; but the closer truth is in how they prefer to treat people. It's soup, safely pulped to facelessness and dehumanized, gummable until the end of days.

Nature isn't so selective. Nature has given us a vast array of possible models.

In fact, it's even given us a model of independent individuals, in groups, that are contained with a larger whole, and all while individuals have the value and worth to grow whole worlds from themselves: a pomegranate. There is no binary. And there are more complex models available if and when we're ready for them.

Democrats vs Republicans

Right now, we have two parties. Both of them are trying their damnedest to instill party loyalty. The why/how/what/when are far, far too complicated to sum up here, and I honestly may never have the urge to try.

One party primarily tries to make boogeymen of easily recognizable groups, with no economic floor. The other party tries to bridge between the groups and boogeymen-sighters, with an economic floor. Both accept that someone must be subsumed to impart their life energies to key deciders. The ongoing question seems to be who gets the hardship and how hard it should be. It's all bolstered up by the acceptance that a select group of people should and will have significantly, disproportionately easier lives, with clearly scannable difference.

This is what we have to change if we, as whole, sincerely want to avoid authoritarianism, including into the foreseeable future. As long as we accept that most people are just numbers-driven fodder to feed the machine of decision-makers and wealth, we will continue to use up people's lives to feed that machine. We've been accepting this for generations, and it is in the deep fabrics of our lives.

Where they bubble up most clearly is where our societal fabric is currently being tested hardest.

• In healthcare, it shows up as having to steeply pay in money, time, attention, administrative burden, and frustration, for the hope to be healthy.
• In SNAP, it shows up as wages being so low compared to the cost of living that people can't afford to eat. It comes loaded with dissonance and shame.
• In housing, it shows up in the VC-owned buildings that remain empty; the bank-owned houses that are allowed to fall to pieces; the mechanics of how people grew to accept that their shelter should be so expensive in our modern world that it should take a long lifetime to be securely yours. It's in the NIMBY fear of "letting" the downtrodden near where you sleep, instead of focusing on raising the floor so they aren't downtrodden; and, getting them in, out of the cold.
• In our information, it's dauntingly wide. DOGE ripping out information, science being defunded, education set up to become something to mark in-group status, genAI's black-boxed poisoning of our information substrate and laundering of our creativity through their formulas for their profit alone, and big tech's enshittification and control of vast repositories of personal data. It's also our behavioral conditioning to focus on reacting to this tiny-bite moment – a conditioning that urges us to ignore the man behind the curtain, ignore history, ignore the throughlines, and focus on how this one thing right here makes you feel. And then, once that feeling is in place, urged to remember that; that history is worth threading into the future.

There's more, but these aspects directly affect our individual survival. It isn't sustainable. It is working as designed.

This is before we even get to designated groups to be subsumed. There is so much involved in identity politics. But dig deep, and there is an acknowledgement that some shit has gone down, and that shit is real because it affected all these people who can't, together, be gaslit that it was due to their individual shame. It takes solidarity to not internalize the personal attacks. We take a moment to celebrate that these people are really fucking cool, and then work for change. It is group-defined trauma as well as group celebration. It's about working with those designated to be downtrodden in the hope of rolling together enough power to install some economic floors.

The floors are put in agnostically, but with focuses on lifting up those who are deeply subsumed. But we lost sight of the goal as we navigated the narrative attacks.

Those penciled in to the deciders column are presented with a narrative that identity politics not about the economic floor. They are urged to develop blame, urged to trust that there is an action that caused the pain for those others. The pain is warranted.

When the floor rises without a ceiling put in place to counterbalance it, the economic pain suffered spreads beyond the original bounds. When the pain spreads to those penciled in, it comes with a search for the retributive shame: What did I do wrong? When there's no valid answer: What did I change? They can find nothing – because the shame was never real, it was always narrative – and so they try to make sense by looking at the people within touching distance, focused on retribution because they accept that punishment must be meted, and pain is punishment.

It's not that they are being targeted. It's that they are numbers, and have been cut loose from potential, erased from the column. Despite promises made and counter to the repeated words, the deciders need people to decide for. The deciders see no reason for honesty towards those they consider theirs to decide what usefulness they embody. When the deciders can no longer plunder certain demographics to the point of damnation, they have to broaden their predation.

It is behavior, narrative, and information manipulation. It's so deep in our social fabric that it's dogma: for me and mine to thrive, others must work, hard, until they die with shortened lives.

Reach for something different.